


Sharper Than a Needle

by Lostflamefox



Series: Original or Fanfic One-Shots [2]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Drug Addiction, Drugs, F/M, Heroin, One-Shot, Open to be Reader or OC, Post-Undertale Pacifist Route, Reader/OC is a heroin addict, This Gets Really Dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-06 16:45:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16836559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lostflamefox/pseuds/Lostflamefox
Summary: His white irises caught their gaze into hers, and the widened, foggy disks suddenly sharpened into something she could only describe as sharper than any needle she'd sunk into her skin. She could tell he wouldn't beat around the bush or skirt around any important issues from that look, like he usually would during conversation. That was his serious expression."why'd you do it?"A question with an answer so complicated that she couldn't find the words to answer. She went with the default, "I don't know."





	Sharper Than a Needle

Amiable exchanges of discussion and gossip faded into the background, nothing more than droning voices to her ears, her racing mind picking up not even the smallest snippets of conversation. Anything that wasn't her current task blurred and fuzzed, morphing into a picture that could only be drawn by a person so ill of mind that only they could comprehend what strokes their brush swiped across the once-clean canvas. The world seemed to thrash and twist in her peripheral vision, until nothing but what she was looking directly at made sense anymore. It seemed as though instead of in reality, she was dwelling in some sort of personal hell.

A coldness came from within the deepest chasms of her being, as if her very center had been replaced with a chunk of dry ice that slowly spread throughout her organs, stealing her very life force and sending her body into a frenzy of shakes and trembling. Pain erupted from the inner muscles of one of her thighs, like the muscles there were being torn and wrenched straight off of her femur. Similarly, pain rose around the muscles of her arms, and an itching sensation rose to just below the skin. Long marks ran across her skin, under her flimsy long sleeves, from where she had dragged what was left of her fingernails to try and appease the itch beneath the topmost layer of skin; most of them were chewed down to the quick, though some sharp edges had begun to grow just past it.

Fumbling with the drawers just below the counter, she searched frantically for the familiar glint of the stainless steel needle that her mind longed for. Even in her haze she knew to keep quiet, otherwise she would get caught, and all promises of her prize would dissipate faster than a snowflake drifting too close to a flame. If she wasn't quick enough she would also risk the prize being swiped away, as soon as someone had the thought to check on her. It put a careful haste into her search as her mind tried to grasp where she had placed the needle that held the salvation to the suffering. The needle that could chase away the cold, and melt the dry ice.

At last, there was the glint. The two syringes lazily rolled along the bottom of the drawer, pushing aside a lost battery they laid near. They were filled with what looked like black tar, though that didn't make them any less appealing. The opaque substance could do wonders to relieve all of her symptoms, it could melt the dry ice that packed into the depths of her soul. One hit and the nightmare, the living hell she was going through, would be temporarily over. As long as she got another soon after, she wouldn't have to feel like she was dying ever again.

Her finger tips graced the glass that encased her bought freedom, running across the smooth surface. The excitement that coursed through her veins, a huge dose of dopamine, made her shaking increase tenfold, but that was easily ignored. Thoughts raced and cascaded off of one another in her head, a delta of feelings and emotion, though her mind couldn't hold on to any of them. They all slipped through its grasp, lost into the void as quickly as they had come. Her head was just as empty as it was full. Everything she had was focused on the black tar heroin, just one injection away from sweeping her pain away, into an abyss of negativity that could be forgotten under its influence.

With one plunge into her skin, she could be lost to the world.

Two, and she wouldn't have to resurface, if she chose the right spot.

Directly into her muscles was her favorite choice, but if she shot up her bloodstream it could have an instantaneous affect, even though it might cause her to overdose. Her mind delved into a dark place, one of peculiar reasoning and conclusions bordering on the insane. Two into her bloodstream, and she wouldn't have to deal with the withdraw symptoms ever again. Only one, and she faced consequences - worse withdraw than before, and the disappointment of the only human being she'd felt close to in the past two years.

Vaguely, the edges of her mind recalled how she had ended up this way. An innocent young woman thrust into the world, thrown out of her home a year prior to the age of eighteen; a cruel joke to her family that abandoned her because she didn't raise high enough to the standards they had set. All it had been was a single cigarette found amid her clothes, and she was as good as dead to the family that had been so distant in her developing years, if she hadn't been considered dead already.

Unemployed, barely anything to call her own, and lost, confused, hurt... she fell deep into the depths of the darkest alleyways and turns of the city, strung forwards by a man whose name she never caught. The last year of school didn't matter anymore. College was so far out of the picture that she nearly forgot what the word meant. Money was always a problem, but problems could be forgotten by a cheap hit, so diluted that it barely could slip out of the needle. She didn't learn anyone's name; she almost forgot her own.

She was dead to the world.

Her heart almost stopped entirely.

Swooping to the rescue was her savior, who, two years ago, had plucked her off of the streets and brought her to someplace where she could get help and medical attention. Her best friend, Gale Glenn. Gale had offered her a home, and a watchful eye to help on her flimsy road to recovery. Already, she had broken the oath she had sworn, to never shoot up a dosage of heroin again. This was the second time she had broken it, and she didn't feel any better about it. Gale's trust was a thing she had to earn over the months she had stayed with her, and twice she had abused the trust they had between them.

Addiction tore her apart like a pack of rapid wolves, ripping out her emotions like muscles, tearing her life into shreds and devouring it into its mighty maw who had destroyed many before her.

Where was Gale then?

In the living room, mere feet away from where she stood hunched over the kitchen counter. Chatting idly with her monster friends who had escaped the Underground half a year ago. A get-together to celebrate the human-monster relations that were improving by the hour, with help of kind-hearted people across the nation. As soon as they had shown their faces to the heat of the sun everyone had forgotten about the drugs crisis that steadily sweeped the nation clean off of its feet, right under their noses as they fawned over the odd creatures that had crawled out of a mountain that the human race had locked them in ages ago.

Even she had forgotten about the drug crisis. The woman who was slowly injecting two doses of heavily diluted black tar heroin directly into her bloodstream. All of her attention was on the monsters, who had stole all of the attention from the plagues that crawled into the hearts of men, leading them on paths of death and sickness. The world had only eyes and ears for the forgotten race, as the body count drugs had reaped rises, bringing a rank stench of death to their noses. Would they notice it?

Her heartbeat grew sluggish as her thoughts slowed, drifting to a place of euphoria, where the world cared about her and people like her. The legs that propped her up against the counter gave way, until the side of her face pressed against the counter, cool to the touch. The syringes clattered to the ground as her fingers twitched and released their grip, and her breathing slowed to match her heart. The heart slowed further, trying to drag the thick sludge through the veins and arteries.

Someone screamed her name, but she was too far gone to respond.

~

The fuzziness that had previously lurked in her peripherals had fogged over her eyes, and she had to blink quite a few times to clear her vision, to see the mess of white that awaited her. Her consciousness was slow to come up to speed, and in the meantime she closed her eyes to spare them from the harsh white of the hospital room. She was laying in a hospital bed, with a familiar prick of a needle in her arm; an IV, she assumed. She could hear the various beeps of machines she was hooked up to.

A world of pain was what she had been dragged back into.

She'd lived.

Light breathing came from the corner of the room, so she knew she had a visitor. When she opened her eyes, she saw that it wasn't Gale sitting in a chair a few feet away, as she had been expecting. In her stead was one of her monster friends. It was a skeleton monster, who's name she had managed to catch - Sans. He was leaning against the back of the seat that was set close to a large window to the right side of the room, taking a nap. She had expected him to be loudly snoring; the one time she had caught him taking a nap, his snores could challenge thunder.

He was the only monster whose name she knew, since they had talked roughly five times during his visits. Like her, he usually kept to the outskirts or completely out of a crowd. That was one of the things they had in common, and had it not been for that she wouldn't have talked to him at all. The only reason his name stuck for good was that even though he knew about her addiction, he didn't react the same as most would.

Sympathy was one of the more common reactions. Some blamed her for her own addiction, and told her to go back out onto the streets to die. Others had no clear reaction at all, and simply never mentioned it. That always was the focal point of any person's thoughts about her, it seemed. She was defined by heroin. Instead of a person, she might as well be a living sack full of needles and drugs, with no feelings. Just an addict. The average addict.

His reaction was one of empathy, sympathy's better half. He had this understanding she never got from other people, unspoken aloud but obviously very present between the two of them. A connection she hadn't gotten from other addicts in her therapy group, even though they had all taken the same drug at some point in their lives. Gale was almost to the point of empathy, but she strayed just before the line. It was still closer than most made it in her world.

Sometimes she wondered if he'd ever been addicted to some substance too. She'd never asked the question; he'd never offered an answer. Stories of monster drugs were like wildfire on the streets she passed - ones that could make heroin seem like a child's plaything in comparison. He didn't seem to be suffering withdraw, but it could be sometime years ago, back when they were still locked underground. Sans definitely seemed like the kind of person to fall victim, and the way he acted suggested to her that maybe he once had, though she was never sure.

Why was he visiting her instead of Gale?

Her mind dived below into the possibilities, dark ones of resentment and sorrow... abandonment. It made her ache inside, and she cursed whatever made the universe flow for not finishing what she had tried to start. Suicide was what she had intended to do, yet it seemed as though the Earth wouldn't quite let go of its grip on her yet. Surviving an overdose was something she had done once before, no matter how unlikely it was. Now she'd done it twice. Now she would have to face the consequences of those she knew, reacting to what she'd done.

Luck seemed to be both smiling upon her, and shoving her violently back into the world she had tried over and over to escape.

She couldn't decide if she should be happy.

... At the moment, she was not.

Letting out a deep sigh, she pressed her back further into the hospital bed. It was one of those adjustable ones, and it was set in a way so that her back was propped up, and her knees slightly rose upwards. The railings that prevented her from rolling off of the bed confined her in place. The machines spread against the wall continued a cacophony of noise that made her temples pulse with the starting of a migraine. The stark-white room was so harsh against her eyes that she wished she could have some sunglasses to block it out. The only soft color in the room was Sans' jacket, but it wasn't in her direct line of vision unless she craned her neck.

An IV was pushed into the vein on her left wrist, and that hand was strapped to the railing to keep her from moving it too much. Her right side had a red button with ' **CALL NURSE** ' printed in bold black letters right under it. Next to the button was a silver tray, with a remote control for a flatscreen bolted high on the wall opposite of her bed. She looked over to the right side of the room again. A door to the farest right, against the huge window, led to a bathroom. A small cluster of three chairs - one occupied - stood in the empty space. Sans was still dozing, though light enough that he wasn't snoring.

At least his snores wouldn't join the machines in their goal to give her the world's worst migraine.

She took the remote control and turned on the TV. On one channel was a show she recognized. 'Adam Ruins Everything'. The episode she had seen once before was playing, but she settled on that channel, turning the volume low and settled back to get comfy on the bed. At least her brain wouldn't rot in her skull from boredom, she supposed.

Don't think about your life.

Think about some cool TV-show you're watching.

That always works.

Shifting of fabric and a groggy groan came from her side, and she glanced over to see Sans rubbing at his eye sockets and waking up from his cat nap. His white irises caught their gaze into hers, and the widened, foggy disks suddenly sharpened into something she could only describe as sharper than any needle she'd sunk into her skin. She could tell he wouldn't beat around the bush or skirt around any important issues from that look, like he usually would during conversation. That was his serious expression.

"why'd you do it?"

A question with an answer so complicated that she couldn't find the words to answer. She went with the default, "I don't know."

He obviously wasn't very satisfied with that, and made a disgruntled noise, blowing air sharply out of his nasal cavity. It made a sharp whistle. "i don't believe that." He sounded disappointed. At least that something she had come to expect. " 'd really like to know why i found you with a needle in both arms and unconscious."

It was starting to dawn on her why he'd come.

He'd been the one to find her.

His accent had lightened up more than usual, like he thought each word through very carefully before speaking, though his voice was a bit deeper with obvious worry and anxiety. It made her feel guilty for not thinking about what people would think as soon as they saw her. Never would it have crossed her train of thought that Sans, one of the only people who seemed to have a connection with her, would find her at her lowest point. On the brink of absolute, permanent destruction.

Selfishly, she'd dragged him into a mess of emotions, without thought.

She sighed, dragging her gaze away from his. "It's hard to explain." If she tried to think out the words for an answer, she might try and find a way back to the brink again.

Thankfully, he got the point and ceded, accepting that as an answer. He was smart enough to guess. "promise me you won't pull somethin' like that again. there's people that care 'bout you."

She doubted it in the back of her mind.

"I promise," she replied anyway.

He was right, however much she didn't believe it. Soon, she'd realize it as well.

**Author's Note:**

> This took me a lot of research to write, and it ended up being somewhat short. I tried to make it in a way that you can decide two things - whether you're the reader or not, and if it ends up being a romantic and not platonic relationship with Sans. The reason this fic came about was the utter lack I've seen of readers or characters in this fandom that have struggles with drug addiction. It is a very widespread and serious topic that I haven't seen practically any try and tackle, so that is what gave me the inspiration to write this One-Shot. (Edit: I've searched it up and there are a few fics on this matter. There aren't very many, however.)
> 
> I'm not 100% happy with this (I never am, really) but I figured I would post it anyway. It's rushed, and I don't like that aspect of it, but One-Shots are hard to draw out and pace correctly to my liking. There will probably be a lot more after these, since my main focus is pacing. Not all of them will be fanfictions, not all of them will have serious topics. Hell, I plan to have a crack shot soon. (Ironic, considering what this one's about.) I hope you enjoyed, and I would love feedback.


End file.
